On January 31st, 1921, a Coast Guard surfman sighted a vessel trapped on North Carolina’s infamous Diamond Shoals. Owing to bad weather, a Coast Guard boat was not able to reach the stranded vessel until February 4. When they boarded the ship, the crew was missing. How the “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals” came to be stranded, and what happened to her crew, is an enduring mystery.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.